If The Getaway had just rolled off the studio assembly line, the work of
a competent craftsman, it could pretty easily have been passed over and
forgotten. It is, however, the work of a major American film artist.
Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western, The Wild Bunch, looks even at this
distance like a great film, and his other movies, from 1961's Ride the
High Country to last year's Straw Dogs, form a body of work as
substantial as any other contemporary film maker's. Such a...